When working on long-term projects with large teams that have high turnover rates, keeping track of project developments can be a challenge. The Indonesia tax project was launched in 2017, and several research assistants and PhD have contributed to the project over the years for varying lengths of time. Similarly, preliminary discussions surrounding the Samurdhi housing lottery project began in 2020 and the project is likely to continue for a few years. The EPoD and JPAL Southeast Asia teams that I have been working with have adopted a number of strategies to ensure efficient on-boarding of new team members and to maintain detailed documentation as the project progresses. It was great to learn more about these tools for facilitating collaboration on long-running projects!
Since short-term RAs and PhD students often only join projects for a few months at a time, it is critical that they quickly familiarize themselves with the project background and can get started on their tasks. When I joined the Indonesia tax project, we had an introductory call to provide an overview of the project and my role, after which the research manager shared several helpful resources that helped me learn more about the project. The team has maintained a Project Guidelines document, a Project Journal, and an On-Boarding presentation that contain detailed information on the project timeline, descriptions of the RCT and survey experiment that are being run, funding sources, and introductions to the team members at JPAL and partners in the Indonesian government. After going over these documents, I had a much better understanding of the project and felt ready to dive into my data analysis tasks! The team also maintains a Slack channel which was a wonderful resource for getting quick responses to questions that came up along the way.
Additionally, the Indonesia tax project team uses Github for version control and documentation of code. This made it very easy to track changes that have been made to the code over time, restore old versions of the code if required, and identify who was in charge various parts of the data analysis. Although I was already somewhat familiar with Github, this was my first time using it extensively, and observing the benefits of systematic version control has motivated me to incorporate this into the workflow for my own projects.
In comparison, the Samurdhi housing project is at a much earlier stage compared to the Indonesia tax RCT. Part of my work on this project has involved setting up some of the project management “infrastructure”, and I was able to draw on the great practices implemented in the Indonesia project. I set up a GitHub repository for the code, made a data tracker to maintain a record of the different versions of the survey data we receive from the Government of Sri Lanka, created an encrypted data container to securely store the survey data using Veracrypt, and wrote readme files providing an overview of the code files and the Dropbox folder organization. We have also scheduled “handover” calls so I can update team members on both projects about the specifics of the tasks I have been working on. With the end of my internship fast approaching, I hope these resources will make it easy for the next person to take over!